“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.” | Continue reading
"Truth cannot die; it passes from mind to mind, imparting light in its progress, and constantly renewing its own brightness during its diffusion. The True is the Beautiful; and the truths revealed to the mind render us capable of perceiving new beauties on the earth." | Continue reading
"In forty years of medical practice," the great neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, "I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical 'therapy' to be vitally important for patients...: music and gardens." Virginia Woolf, savaged by depression throughout and out of her life, arrived … | Continue reading
"Words belong to each other," Virginia Woolf asserted in the only surviving recording of her voice. But words also belong to us, as much as we belong to them - and out of that mutual belonging arises our most fundamental understanding of the world, as well as the inescapable misu … | Continue reading
"Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now," Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful 1957 letter. "Kindness, kindness, kindness," Susan Sontag resolved in her diary on New Year's Day in 1972.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
“The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language.” | Continue reading
In the final weeks of 1993, Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931-August 5, 2019) became the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize, awarded her for being a writer "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of … | Continue reading
Thinking lately about what it means to have the right heart, which intimates the question of what it means to tend to one's own heart rightly, I was reminded of a passage from what may be the loveliest, truest, most quietly transcendent thing ever written about the art of growing … | Continue reading
“The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?” | Continue reading
Consolation for our learned brokenness on the path to healing. | Continue reading
In 1973, more than two decades after a young woman wrote to Albert Einstein with a similar concern, one man sent a distressed letter to E.B. White (July 11, 1899-October 1, 1985), lamenting that he had lost faith in humanity.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
On February 13, 1924, Punch magazine published a short poem titled "Teddy Bear" by Alan Alexander Milne (January 18, 1882-January 31, 1956), one of the magazine's editors and a frequent contributor. The poem was inspired by the stuffed teddy bear Milne had given to his son, Chris … | Continue reading
“…and joy instead of will.” | Continue reading
On aligning the things we make with basic human values for an enduring world. | Continue reading
“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around.” | Continue reading
From pigeons to parakeets, an uncommonly beautiful celebration of biodiversity. | Continue reading
“The mind enjoys the complete and perfect benefit of its human destiny only when… entering the secret heart of nature.” | Continue reading
"Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul... Seek solitude," young Delacroix counseled himself in 1824. Keats saw solitude as a sublime conduit to truth and beauty. Elizabeth Bishop believed that everyone should experience at least one prolonged … | Continue reading
“The thought that we must die… is the reason we must live well.” | Continue reading
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called … | Continue reading
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875-December 19, 1926) is one of the most prolific and poetic letter writers in history, a supreme master of what Virginia Woolf called "the humane art," with more than seven thousand of his epistles surviving today.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
In October of 1883, a paper in the nation's capital reported under the heading "Current Gossip" that "an Iowa woman has spent seven years embroidering the solar system on a quilt" - a news item originally printed in Iowa and syndicated widely in newspapers across the country that … | Continue reading
Friendship is one of life's greatest graces, and yet we hardly understand the gossamer threads of sympathy and love by which it binds us together. C.S. Lewis likened it to philosophy, art, and the universe itself in that "it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things … | Continue reading
“The handicaps under which Dr. Turner’s work was accomplished were many, and were modestly and bravely met.” | Continue reading
How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world. | Continue reading
"The true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness. Happiness to the individual in the first place. If individuals were universally happy, the species would be happy." | Continue reading
Living into the risk and responsibility of the multiple identities we carry. | Continue reading
“The gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality.” | Continue reading
“Intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does.” | Continue reading
On remaining in loving contact with the intangible, immutable part of the self. | Continue reading
Nearly a century before Walt Whitman led us to see that "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars," Immanuel Kant proclaimed that there will never be a Newton for a blade of grass. There may not be a Newton, but there is a Leibniz.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
A vibrant foray into “a perfect world of wonders” fueled by the bittersweet dimension of life. | Continue reading
"I am because my little dog knows me," Gertrude Stein wrote. Who hasn't found in the eyes of a beloved dog the most generous mirror, an infinity of love, and that soulful look that says, "If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled"?(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
"Fearlessness is what love seeks," Hannah Arendt wrote in her magnificent early work on love and how to live with fear. "Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future... Hence the only valid tense is the present, … | Continue reading
“Everything we do matters, and matters wondrously.” | Continue reading
The best things in life we don't choose - they choose us. A great love, a great calling, a great illumination - they happen unto us, like light falling upon that which is lit. We have given a name to these unbidden greatnesses - genius, from the Latin for "spirit," denoting the s … | Continue reading
“Great genial power… consists… in being altogether receptive.” | Continue reading
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called … | Continue reading
“Paths run through people as surely as they run through places.” | Continue reading
"The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence," Adrienne Rich asserted in her spectacular 1997 lecture Arts of the Possible . But it was exactly three decades earlier that another of humanity's most incisive intellects made the finest - and … | Continue reading
“I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence.… | Continue reading
On the emotional machinery that suspends us between rapture and tears. | Continue reading
A simple perspective shift that reorients the roots of being. | Continue reading
“We have, because human, an inalienable prerogative of responsibility which we cannot devolve…not… even upon the stars. We can share it only with each other.” | Continue reading
"A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood," Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron as he contemplated the interplay of discipline and creativity. A century later, James Baldwin echoed the sentiment in his advice on writing, observing: "T … | Continue reading
“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” | Continue reading
“It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.” | Continue reading
Every creator's creations are their coping mechanism for life - for the loneliness of being, for the longing for connection, for the dazzling incomprehension of what it all means.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading